Lucas Nussbaum
has just been
reelected
by the Debian Developers as the Debian Project Leader.
It has been a pleasure and a honor to serve as the Debian Project Leader
for the past year. I am very thankful for having been given the opportunity
to continue for a second term, and I hope that I will be meeting the
project's expectations during the coming year, Lucas said.
His opponent in these elections, Neil McGovern,
[...] would like to congratulate Lucas for winning the election, and hope
that Debian continues to go from strength to strength.
More information about the result is available in the
Debian Project Leader Elections 2014 page.
The new term for the project leader will start on April 17 2014 and expire on
April 17 2015.

Stefano Zacchiroli wrote on
his blog about the
debsources statistics
that he has been working on recently, announcing that they now draw on an
increased statistical basis, including all historical Debian releases since Hamm,
which was released in 1998. As for the usefulness of such
a laborious documenting task, Stefano points out that it allows us
to appreciate macro-level evolution trends in
Free Software, over a period of more than 15 years, through
the eyes of a distro that sits at the nice intersection of
the eldest, largest, and most reputed distros. By
combining information stored in the
Debian archive
and the debsources database,
the debsources statistics provide some relevant information
about Debian's evolution, such as (for example) overviews in
table and graphical form of the amount of source code
written in the different programming languages used over
the years, thus contributing significantly to what Stefano
calls a long-time preservation of digital information in
general, and for the perennity of access to Free Software
in the specific case of Debian.

According to the official stats,
the Barcelona Mini-DebConf held last March was a great success, especially in
terms of participation by women: of the 160 attendees, 36% were women.
Tássia Camões Araújo, member of the organisation
team, explains: as we didn’t collect gender information at the registration,
it is hard to make a clear comparison with previous DebConfs. Since 2007, the
rate of non-male participants ranged from 13% to 17%. For this Mini-DebConf,
the orga team did the gender identification per name and found a non-male rate
of 36%. Again, since the methods were not the same we cannot safely compare,
but still, I think it’s worth it to make this info public.
Various attendees wroteenthusiasticreports and the
videos of the talks
are already available.

Unlike all other certificate authorities, CAcert is a community-driven
certificate authority providing SSL/TLS certificates free of charge.
Not only because of that way of functioning, similar to
Debian's approach, Debian has been shipping the CAcert root
certificate since 2005, even after CAcert had withdrawn
its request to be included in Mozilla's trusted certificate
store back in 2007, due to an ongoing internal audit.
Discussion of whether to continue distributing CAcert's root
certificate in Debian's trusted certificate store arose in response to a
bug
filed in July 2013 advocating its removal.
After months of debate on the pros and cons it was on March 13 that Michael Shuler,
the maintainer of the ca-certificates package, finally made public the
decision
to no longer ship the CAcert root certificate with Debian.
For a detailed summary of the discussion please refer to the
LWN article on the subject.

Based on the
assessment
made by Empathy's package maintainer, Simon Vittie,
that Empathy has an Instant Messaging background rather
than being very suited for voice and video, Daniel Pocock
has kicked off a discussion on his
website
about the convenience of choosing a new WebRTC-compliant
RTC/VoIP client for Debian 8 Jessie.
Arguing that any suitable client will need to support
the open WebRTC standard that has been embedded in
all Firefox/Iceweasel and Chromium/Chrome browsers
for more than a year now, Daniel gives a detailed comparison of
Empathy and Jitsi, concluding that in his view, the latter would be
the best choice for Jessie.

Tails
is a Debian-derivative live system aiming at
preserving the privacy and anonymity of its users
by making use by default of the
TOR network
and cryptographic tools. There is currently a
fundraising campaign for Tails and other related
free software projects, so they can stay ahead of the security curve.

Holger Levsen
announced
the creation of the Debian OTR team,
maintaining various packages related to Off-the-Record
messaging which provides encryption, authentication, deniability and
Perfect Forward Secrecy. The team welcomes any contribution, from bug reporting
and triaging, to bugfixing, packaging and backporting.

Francesca Ciceri
sent
some bits from the
DebConf Subtitle Team.
The team now provides subtitles for 10 talks from DebConf 13.
Now that the videos of the Barcelona Mini-DebConf are available,
the team is calling for volunteers to help subbing them. Contributions to the
team are now registered in the
Debian Contributors list.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party?
Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events?
Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our
talks page?
Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing
list (and the separate backports
list, and stable updates
list) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.